“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at …bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins thinks brilliantly, in a domesticated enclosure, an Uncle Tom. Consider universal indifference. It contains a wonderful spark of opportunity thanks to our unique mental acuity. The flow of our mental acuity is no less indifferent than the rest of the universe. Yet it allows for the evolution of populations of memetic species. The resulting memeological environment evolves/adaptates (sic) many factors more efficiently than the human-physiological environment. Now, are we because of our own mental acuity really to be the livestock of our own memetic dynamic, or are we to domesticate it to maintain it as our pride and joy, allowing us to actually step outside the artificial* and increasingly alien* fences and border-lines? It depends whether we are willing to entertain this certain species of memeology, a certain meta-language which I call human-existential language.
Richard Dawkins is not a true skeptic. He believes in progress, and by his own admission, without a clue what progress is.
*artificial and alien only in the sense of what is natural to our animal form.
Unfortunately the video is in fundamental error: It surreptitiously shifts between two contradictory perspectives, conflating them.
1) the video claims that the cube is not only a mathematical abstraction but represents a real cubic space that can include things we think of as real
AND AT THE SAME TIME
2) the video claims with supernatural certainty that the cube cannot include the real things it “obviously” cannot include.
How is it capable of doing this? The nature of the cube opportunistically shifts between “real” and “abstract” between (1) and (2), while in fact it is only abstract. A cube cannot contain anything at all, because it is abstract. As soon as it includes something, it is not a cube, but a cube with something in it, or a cube with nothing in it, if the abstraction is “nothing.” Any abstraction can be in existential singularity of itself alone. But to claim it to be outside the realm of mathematics is delusional. Nothing real is a cube. It is only seems to us to be like a cube.
What is the significance of this observation? Well, that we human beings are up to our necks into this kind of symbolic nonsense as a result of thinking we can use symbols to qualify our existence. We believe so deeply in the vast, evolving cacophonic population of imaginary abstractions (concepts/symbols/words) that we believe we can fix the absurdity only if the vast, evolving cacophonic population of imaginary abstractions (concepts/symbols/words) evolve ever faster.
(Of course thickly mixed in this we find the ulterior faith in gods as symbolism also, BUT we also find a specific abstract construction of change, known as “evolution.”)
We want to believe in our own existence. But we now metaphysically need the Shaman-type language of faith in sophisticated symbolic meaning to qualify our own existence to believe in. We never actually come to believe in our own existence (as existential singularity). Our linguistic error of categorizing ulterior to our own human existence is very fundamental, but it drives all civilized reality, and it drives the mindless need for “Progress.”
All definitions are incomplete. The fallacious symbolism of assuming that some definitions are complete, is inherent to the way we use language, and it is driving us headlong into technological singularity.
I agree wholeheartedly with the extent of the human atrocity of the sex industry and sex slave trade now organizing for heightened acitivity during the World Cup, and the need to stop it now, but I disagree with the official approach of punishing humans involved as criminals. No human should be wiped off the planet. The human-destructive ideas they hold and their actions should be wiped off the planet. Sexual exploitation of children is not a matter of human badness or even badness in general. The answer is not immediately apparently linear. Adult punishment is similar to corporal punishment. The problem and solution is much, much deeper. The source of these kinds of criminal atrocities is the fundamentally delusional way all of us use language.
The “Predator” campaign in the USA as part of a concerted attack on human essence, is in its effective result and implicit intention the criminalization of humanity. We consequently watch each other with undeserved suspicion, in our gross subjectivity as machine-culture, instead of questioning the culture as the development of crime- driven human minds. The real Predator in the sexual exploitation of children is the Shamanic virtual reality of the machine in which open reality rationalization force people into any and all virtual behavioral tracks.
Just to illustrate how deep we are into this: Even people who act with apparently the most positive energy possible, vilify individuals who question the mechanical source of that perception of positive energy. They superficially perceive any opposition to the familiarly harmonious machine culture of the fantasy world in which they are immersed as negative energy. They inadvertently serve as puppets dressing up and covering up the horror of the machine. In identifying themselves as machine in the guise of being human, they counterintuitively help to perpetuate and accelerate the human-destructiveness of the open natural selection of ideas as viruses, (memes).
We should develop a better sense of deep human-existential free speech. Free speech is fundamentally anti-human as it now exists, because language is beyond human-existential, as I am trying to expose. It is universe-existential. Free speech ought not to ever be more sacred than human existence and human dignity. And very important; this approach to free speech is a matter about what we define as human. Do we allow existential expression beyond human existence and make objects of humans? Do we define crime as human by punishing humans for it? I think it is a serious and chronic mistake.
Phalanxes of shamans
held dear the bursting glare of Ra
and the radiation of that light
unfolded Hades in projection
as everlasting pain
Until not so very long ago,
in the flow of time
muse Plato added to the myth,
“chained we are, backs turned
to raging fires on the floor
unlike gods we only see
shadows moving on the wall.”
Plato furthermore proclaimed
that we cannot see
“The Beauty of the Forms…,”
yet they are there
as sure as gods are there
this I know my dearest friends
it is all but life like burning flame
in the simmer of the peacock’s tail
and the hollows in our hearts
to where the shadows split
to “us as all” and “all as us”
adrift in cosmic passion flow
consuming in its artificial bowl
the little human left
Note on the last verse:
… with Aristotles’ subsequent Shamanic claim that, like the supposed gods, we can indeed know “The Forms,” the shadows described in Plato’s Shamanic mythology ironically took the virtual form of the imaginary Forms.
Consider that civliization hinges on rationalization, Like Haiti, the human tragedy in Zimbabwe is not the fault of a lack of civilization, it is because of it. This kind of human suffering is the attrition at the frayed edges of civilization. Civilization has been in machine mind singularity for millennia, with its inhuman cosmopolitical preconceptions. For instance, it is less than four hundred years ago that one-third of Europe’s population was killed over ideas. They wiped each other out in hot blood, by blade and musket ball, over technicalities in the burgeoning mythology of Christ. Machine mind singularity is about to explode in our faces if we cannot find a way to wake up from our paternalistic delusion. Sophisticated civilization is exactly as sad as Zimbabwe, and it is the same dynamic.
To clarify: The example I use here of Christianity’s sectarian violence: look at the word “cosmopolitical.” Cosmos + polis. The result of the chaos of the 30-year war in 17th century Europe was that we now conduct civilization in delusional reflection of Newton’s cosmic “order.”
Technological singularity is about to happen, which in a cosmic framework, will be an explosion of cosmic vitality. But it will also be human species extinction, which is an implosion. The great error is to focus on the problem of the fraying anywhere, on the fringes or in the center. The problem is the non-human nature of the extreme mechanical order and vitality in the center.
Note Chomsky’s pathological dualist idea of “human nature” as being defined by urges far beyond mere human existence. The kind of blind, burning creativity Chomsky hammers on is not a human characteristic. It is more a hormone-like onslaught to which civilized minds by definition of being “civilized” have developmentally become dismally subject.
This is the context of Foucault’s uneasy reference to the clandestine POLICING function of universities, psychiatry and justice to bring human minds into the fold. Foucault implies that Chomsky’s insanity is normal. It is the norm. Chomsky does not even begin to understand. His statement of agreement with Foucault is a rhetorical device to bring focus back on his argument. He has no clue what Foucault says.
You cannot pinpoint a culture in terms of the level of machine consciousness of its top intellectual leaders, because the highest machine consciousness is most mechanically subject to the game, and the machine consciousness of the whole population is in the game.
Note:
1) dynamics like mentor-mentee are relevant.
2) “maturity” is vaguely a more common label for what I call machine consciousness.
- Facebook entry 13 February 2010
In somewhat more normal language, “the collective maturity keeps the highest maturity on track.” Caveat, my analysis is also perspective, but it is perspective showing that perspectives ignorant of the super-existential urge of perspectives are super-existential. They are not only superfluous. They accelerate unpredictable change. I think we can survive the next century as a species if we place this warning central in a consequently vastly adapted methodology.
Also, I would say that Jung’s perspective of collective unconscious (of innate potential for directive archetype) is pervasively cultural and not innate, because there is no independent agency that we can honestly pinpoint. The terrible dystopian scaffolding of Cartesian mind-body duality strengthens this idea. It persists even today. Mind is not separable from nature’s determination. And to say as people have been doing the last few decades, that we have advanced our maturity by claiming unity with the universe is a joke. It supports the massive status quo momentum of the universe of exponentially accelerating change in any which way direction brought about by dialectics.
The only directive is existential power. Collective unconscious can be seen as another more esoteric element vaguely included in this collectivity of what I call “machine consciousness.” Jung’s idea of collective unconscious is not human. It is memetic machine.
I guess the answer to my concern about transhumanism is habitually in the realm of privileged knowledge, or swept under the carpet. I am by now not surprised how incapable my fellow humans are of learning from history. Rationalization dominates them more than ever before. They smugly think the usual superficial changes are profound.
Every single of our worst historical atrocities was but a small sprout of an ever-proliferating root system common to all of them, and I see it over the years ever more solidly sunk. Machine minds do not want to hear about it. This root system is subject-object language and concrete faith in symbolic objects that simply do not exist. I hope to be in the process of uprooting it and stomping it into the dust.
If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? ○ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Consider the immediate cultural background of the 18th century romantic, Coleridge: His Romanticism, as evidenced by the quote, is only tokenly a negation of the 17th century notion of the thinking man, by which instead “the thinking man” to him means the well-rounded, progressive man, or modern man.
Reason:
Coleridge still favors the notion of mind-body duality and implicitly the misconception of the superiority of Reason over Emotion, starting with Descartes in the 17th century (vs. the more practical Montaigne of the 16th century). Wrong for human life in my opinion, because the thinking human mind is not close to being capable of considering enough variables to know what is happening to humanity in the resulting proliferation and acceleration of late civilization’s organization and technology.
Emotion:
The main thrust of Romanticism was to soften and thereby validate the hard rise of scientific certainty and industrial revolution. It effectively introduced artistic or symbolic release of our emotional human nature in facilitation of the newly emerging hard-rational endeavor. Romanticism was not an effective movement to abolish industry. So Romanticism and Rationalism still work together today to push humanity hard into and through technological singularity.
p.s. This apart from Coleridge’s musing apparently excluding woman.
The purpose of being human is to be human = human existentialism. 19th through 21st century existentialism or humanness qualified by “thinking” and “(individual) progress” is not human existential. It is machine-existential.
Born early Saturday morning May 24, 1958 in Cape Town, SA where it is now
Home: The Woodlands, TX
Machine Mind Singularity has utterly supplanted human perspective in the way humans make meaning. It is a meta atrocity worse than any historical or criminal atrocity because it is the underlying cause of all such atrocity. Machine perspective is also the underlying cause of all the individual horrors of unpredictable consequences like the ongoing destruction of the biosphere and pervasive human blindness to primal human concerns: even to its own extinction.
